Rhael Dane moved first.The moment Darius left the office to compose himself, Rhael made a call for about five minutes after which he stepped into the corridor outside the negotiation suite with the calm of a man carrying out ordinary protocol. Two attendants were already waiting near a silver service cart. Fine tea. Water. Crystal glasses. A covered bottle of imported wine. Everything looked polished enough to pass under any official eye.Rhael stopped beside the cart and looked at both attendants.“No mistakes,” he said.One of them lowered his head. “Yes, sir.”“The General wants everything smooth,” Rhael added. “No delays. No confusion. No one enters unless cleared.”The second attendant nodded quickly. “Understood, Brigadier General.”Rhael’s gaze dropped to the drinks. His hand hovered over the tray for half a second, then withdrew. “Which glass is for the guest?”The older attendant pointed. “The tall crystal on the right, sir.”Rhael gave one curt nod. “Good. Keep it that wa

His anger rose fast, then disappeared under control. Rhael noticed it. So did Ethan. So did Lorne.Years of command training forced the anger back down before it could fully surface. A head of state could not afford open irritation in front of an opponent. Especially not an opponent who was watching every expression with quiet patience.Darius exhaled once and forced his expression back into something composed. “Okay,” he said. “Since that is what you asked for, I will give it to you. Negotiations it is.”He leaned back slightly, as if settling into state business now instead of personal resentment.“Despite what happened at Linbourgh,” he said, “despite the fact that your company building was left untouched and your five million pounds of uranium remained in your possession after certain bad eggs inside the Herold military were exposed, I am still the leader of Verdanis.”His eyes hardened. “And I still have an interest in your uranium resources. Along with certain privileges I fin

Poison rarely needed permission to announce its presence.Still nothing happened.The silence grew uncomfortable. Even the soft hum of the room’s ventilation seemed louder than before, as if the building itself was waiting for something terrible to reveal itself.Ethan went on, voice steady. “You came into this room thinking you were negotiating from a throne. You are not. What happened at Linbourgh changed that.”Darius did not react to the words. He only watched.Still nothing.Seconds stretched.Then a full minute.A full minute was far longer than most fast poisons required. The delay pressed against Darius’s confidence, slowly turning certainty into a quiet, creeping doubt.Ethan’s posture remained relaxed. His breathing remained even. His hand did not move toward his stomach. His face did not lose color.Darius felt a thread of unease slide into his chest.For the first time since the toast, the thought crossed his mind that something might have gone wrong. He pushed the idea aw

Ethan’s words landed harder than the gun in his hand.“Before I walked through those doors,” he said, his eyes fixed on Darius, “someone warned me.”Ethan let the silence breathe after that sentence. He wanted the weight of it to settle on everyone in the room. The truth often hurt more when it arrived slowly, and right now he could see the first cracks appearing in Darius’s confidence.The room seemed to shrink around that sentence. Even the attendants against the wall seemed afraid to breathe too loudly. The quiet felt unnatural, like the moment before thunder breaks a storm. Everyone understood that the conversation had crossed the point where it could ever return to diplomacy.Darius stared at him, still half-bent from shock, while Colonel Markus Vale stood stiff under Captain Lorne’s gun. The female attendant kept both confiscated weapons in her hands, aiming them at both colonel Vale and General Darius with the confidence of someone who had stopped pretending to be harmless.

Darius’s question hung in the room like smoke that refused to clear.“What do you mean?” he asked.Ethan did not answer at once. He kept his gun low but ready. His eyes were fixed on Darius with a steadiness that made the silence feel heavier. Behind him, Captain Lorne still held Colonel Vale in place. The female spy did not move either. On the floor, Rhael Dane lay where he had fallen, and his corpse gave the whole room the kind of truth no speech could soften.Ethan continued.“I mean Linbourgh should have taught you something,” he said. “But clearly it did not.”Darius’s face hardened a little, as if the name itself offended him. “Linbourgh was a complicated operation.”Ethan gave a faint, cold smile. “No. Linbourgh was a lesson. You just refused to learn it.”He took another slow step forward, not threatening, not theatrical, just certain. “You came for my company. You came for my underground resources. You came thinking you could take everything with force and still walk away ca